Borderline Fantastic Sports

But is Bracket Boy Fail necessary?

I didn’t watch the championship. I watched the entire tourney up to the last game. My bracket had been done for a while. I was pulling for Michigan St but it wasn’t close from the start. I checked in and saw it was a 20 point game and went to bed. I’ve stayed up in the past just to see One Shining Moment, but I wouldn’t of made it. So here it is, in its web glory.

I think Obama knows more than me about college basketball this year. My question is, what happens when everything goes just like this? Don’t you have to support our president and throw the game if he didn’t pick you?

Make your bracket picks!

I’ve never really understood the Big 10/ACC Challenge. Why those conferences? Doesn’t Big 10/Pac-10 make more sense due to their college football connection? It’s not even a fair fight. The ACC has won every year and only Michigan St has a winning record out of the Big 10 schools. It’s been around long enough that it looks like its here to stay. One tweak I’d like to see is that each school play 2 games, 1 home, 1 away would be nice. It could also try and incorporate the 12th ACC team, who doesn’t play since there are only 11 schools in the Big 10. Although I do kind of like the penalty of the last place team being left out.

I mention all this because as I was looking at the upcoming college basketball schedule I saw some references to the Big 12/Pac-10 Hardwood Series. Not too terrible a name. Maybe a Pac-10/Big East matchup would be a little cooler. The farther the teams are apart the less likely they will play each other often. Now apparently last year was the 1st of this matchup. Nice job marketing this one, as I didn’t hear about it.

Here are this year’s matchups from the Pac-10. How many years until they can get all these games into a few day window instead of it running from November 29 until December 28?

Thursday, December 4, 2008
Oklahoma State at Washington
UCLA at Texas
USC at Oklahoma

Friday, December 5, 2008
Arizona at Texas A&M

Saturday, December 6, 2008
Baylor at Washington State
Oregon State at Iowa State

Sunday, December 7, 2008
Kansas State at Oregon
Nebraska at Arizona State
California at Missouri

Outside the four-day series window
Colorado at Stanford (Sat., Nov. 29, 2008)
Kansas at Arizona (Tue., Dec. 23, 2008)
Texas Tech at Stanford (Sun., Dec. 28, 2008)

The Philly Hoop Group Classic starts on Sunday with Towson playing at Niagara. I’m not sure if I missed this last year because I wasn’t paying attention or if I ran across it this year because I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the college basketball schedule this year while setting up Ice Cream Helmet College Basketball Picks.

Eight teams participate in the Classic. The teams are divided into two brackets: Liberty and Independence. It starts off with each team playing 2 games against teams from the other bracket at one of schools. Thanksgiving weekend at the Palestra there are 4 games on Friday. The winners and losers match up on Saturday for another 4 games. It is a little odd that it ends there. Each bracket winds up with a winner, they don’t play each other. Still, I like that its lots of basketball each day at The Palestra.

Last year was the first year for the Classic. Seton Hall beat Virginia to win the Independence Bracket. Drexel topped Loyola to win the Liberty Bracket.

This year’s teams:
Liberty Bracket
Hartford
Monmouth
Niagara
NJIT

Independence Bracket
Penn State
Rhode Island
Towson
Villanova

Penn state will play home games against NJIT (Nov 17) and Hartford (Nov 20). Before the bracket portion they have a home game against New Hampshire (Nov 23) and a game against Penn (Nov 25) at The Palestra. Then they will play the 2 bracket games at The Palestra. So Penn State will play 3 games in a row at The Palestra.

Ice Cream Helmet started with the NCAA Basketball Tournament in 2007. For this season, I’ve added College Basketball Picks.

The season will start on Week 3 of the season, which is November 24th. I looked at the games for the first 2 weeks and saw that a total of 5 games qualified, based on my ratings, to be picked.

There are 2 problems with the first few weeks of the season. First, even more than college football, good basketball teams warm up with cupcakes. Second, most of the good games this early in the season come in early season tournaments. Those matchups are only known a day or 2 in advance. So there would be no way to pick those games. The easiest way to handle things was to just say that picks would begin in Week 3.

I mentioned that some early games didn’t qualify for my ratings. These are the ratings I use to determine which games will be picked each week. The ratings mostly use the rankings. I tried to find the best matchups with the better teams in Division 1. This comes out to about 10 games per week for Weeks 3-8 and about 20 games per week the rest of the season. These estimates came from the ratings at the end of last season, using this season’s schedule. The numbers for this year should wind up being just about the same.

You can choose to just make picks that will count toward your ICH Score or create your own group. Creating your own group will let you add things like wager points or drop lowest scoring weeks.

The first set of picks should be ready to go mid-next week. Get started creating your groups and getting your friends to sign up now!

College Basketball Picks

I’ve also created the following pages to help you follow college basketball. These pages include my favorite feature, the team info pop-ups. They will show the team’s record as well as recent and upcoming schedule.
Scores/Schedule
Standings
Teams
Rankings

Also, if you click on any of the schools, it will take you to the school’s page. These are still being worked on. Right now it will show you the basketball schedule and football schedule, if that school has a D1A team.